Wow. The third such story in about a week[1][2]. This is the flipside of automation. People said "store your data in the magically overpriced cloud, it's much

Wow. The third such story in about a week[1][2]. This is the flipside of automation. People said "store your data in the magically overpriced cloud, it's much safer than running your own servers! And also automate everything!" However by now I am convinced that people are more likely to lose data clicking the wrong thing in the horrifyingly complex mess that is AWS and the like than a single dedicated server becoming unrecoverable. Maybe instead of this "automate everything" we should pick and choose which things should be automated, and what should be performed manually. Probably shouldn't have automated data loss. Other professions have known the risks of a dangerous thing being too easy or too fast for ages. And I don't mean "slap another password prompt and a second confirmation dialog on it". I mean: want to perform some destructive/dangerous action? You'll have to perform it for each server/customer individually. Yes it's going to take days, but at least you'll only fuck up for some of them before you realize your mistake. "Really? But can we please automate that?!" Sigh. Just make sure it stays slow and still takes days, so you can stop it before everything is gone. Incremental rollouts are the second best thing. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196131 Canon [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24229864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24229864 Adobe